The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [7]
It would be wrong, however, to write off the People’s Choice project worthless, for it did reveal one stunning fact. People in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of repre sentation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, figures, and animals. More remarkable still was the fact that people across the globe preferred landscapes of a fairly uniform type: Kenyans appeared to like landscapes that more resembled upstate New York what we might think of as the present flora and terrain of Kenya. In interview in Painting by Numbers, the book that presented the data paintings for the project, Alexander Melamid remarks (apparently into a tape recorder):
It might seem like something funny, but, you know, I’m thinking that this blue landscape is more serious than we first believed. Talking to people in the focus groups before we did poll and at the town hall meetings around the country after almost everyone you talk to directly—and we’ve already talked hundreds of people—they have this blue landscape in their head. It sits there, and it’s not a joke. They can see it, down smallest detail. So I’m wondering, maybe the blue landscape ge ne tically imprinted in us, that it’s the paradise within, came from the blue landscape and we want it . . . We now completed polls in many countries—China, Kenya, Iceland, on—and the results are strikingly similar. Can you believe Kenya and Iceland—what can be more different in the whole fucking world—and both want blue landscapes.
He goes on to say that a dream of modernism was to “find universal art,” that “the square was what could unite people.” But modernism’s dream turns out to be a delusion: “The blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all mankind.”
Komar and Melamid drop the subject, but it is raised again by the pher and art critic for the Nation, Arthur Danto, in his philosophical meditation on the most-wanted paintings. He is annoyed by George Washington and a hippo sharing the scene, calling America’s Most Wanted mischievous” painting that ironically no one actually wants. He finds it predictable that a poll of American tastes should yield a landscape Hudson River Biedermeier” style. But he, too, is surprised that
throughout the world the results have been strikingly congruent, in the sense that each country’s Most Wanted looks like, take a few details, every other Most Wanted . . . And it is very least cause for reflection that what randomly selected populations of the world round “most want” are paintings in generic, all-purpose realist style the artists invented for America’s Most Wanted . . . The “most wanted painting,” speaking transna-tionally, is a nineteenth-century landscape . . . the kind of painting whose degenerate descendants embellish calendars from Kalamazoo to Kenya.
Danto then tosses out a remark that is consistent with Melamid’s meditation and, if true, would undermine a generation or two of theory (including Danto’s own theory of art): “The 44-percent-blue landscape with water and trees must be the a priori aesthetic universal, what everyone who thinks of art first thinks of, as if modernism never happened.”
As if modernism never happened? Having put forward this hypothetical challenge to his own deeply held theoretical commitments, Danto then tries to explain the uncanny cross-cultural uniformity: “It is possible, of course, that everyone’s concept of art was formed by calendars even in Kenya), which now constitutes a sort of paradigm of what everyone thinks of when they think of art.” Referring to psychological research that shows there are paradigms that govern what people think of first when asked to identify something in a category (asked name a bird, people will usually think robin or sparrow, not albatross kiwi), Danto tries to argue